EVPS – The Mystery Of Thomas Edison’s Theory

EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomenon and the definition of it means to have captured unexplained sounds and disembodied voices electronically.

Reports of this phenomenon goes back 100s of years but the most recognised era for EVP is in the 1920’s.

Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor, developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb and he was Dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park . He believed that it might be possible to capture disembodied voices with a machine, he wrote: “If our personality survives (after death), then it is strictly logical or scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, other faculties, and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth. Therefore … if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.”

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the concept of EVP but it was suggested that through his research he did bring the phenomenon to the attention of others. In October of 1920, an article appeared in American Magazine entitled “Edison Working to Communicate with the Next World” and other similar headlines made it across the globe. He started devising methods to communicate with the dead after his mother passed away. This made Thomas more eager to perfect a method to communicate with her. Thomas stated he wasn’t a believer but did say that he is could provide a method that science would recognise as some kind of proof then he would.

It was said that with the help from his assistant, Dr. Miller Hutchison, he started to physically build a device which matched his theory. While his devised machine was started, it was never actually finished by Mr. Edison due to his death in 1931. This machine which was later named the Thomas Edison Communicator (TEC) and it is believed experiments to use the device through Thomas’s documentation has been made but clearly the results never reached Thomas’s expectation.

After Thomas’s death many claimed that in 1941, Thomas reportedly made contact at a
séance held in New York. Mr. Edison’s spirit reportedly said that the plans for the machine were with three of his assistants. According to the story, the machine was finally built but it did not work. Another story tells of how Mr. Edison made contact at another séance giving a few suggestions for changes to his machine. One of the people supposedly present at this séance was J. Gilbert Wright, the inventor of putty, who later claimed to have made the changes Edison’s machine and then used it to contacted the spirit of Charles Steinmetz, a deceased inventor, who gave Mr. Wright further suggestions for improvements to the machine. Wright reportedly continued to work on the machine until 1959 when he passed away and once again the machine supposedly vanished.

Over the years there has been mass confusion if the device ever existed or not, some believe that Thomas did believe the theory and was constructing such a device while others believe not, one report says that After a few years, Edison admitted that he had made the whole thing up. The Edison National Historic Site take care of over five million pages of documents. None of them mention such an experiment.

Even to this day Mr. Edison’s machine or his notes concerning such have ever been found. Did his machine really exist or was it a mere joke he played upon a reporter in the 1920’s? I think it may be one of them mysteries we will never no!